HIDDEN LAND
The moon was rising. As it gleamed above the mountains east of them, its lambent light poured down into the dark forest of the gorge like quicksilver trickling through a sieve.
Shan Kar remained crouched as a pool of the vague light widened around him. The little quartz disks on the headpiece of platinum he wore caught the light and shone brilliantly. The man's olive face was taut, his eyes stared, unseeing, into the darkness.
"What is it? What has happened now?" came Li Kin's anxious voice from the darkness.
Behind the little Chinese, Eric Nelson heard the rattle of the ponies' hoofs on stones and Lefty Wister cursing steadily.
"Cursed native mumbo-jumbo, that's all!" swore Nick Sloan. "Are we going to stand here all night?"
Nelson laid a hand on the other's sleeve. "Wait, Sloan. Shan Kar seems to know what he's doing."
Again a wolf howled, this time a lonely wailing single cry, echoing away, infinitely pregnant with menace.
Shan Kar finally broke his taut immobility, leaping to his feet and jerking the platinum circlet from his head.
"I have talked with my people in Anshan. They warn that a force of the Brotherhood is on its way to cut us off inside the pass, and that their own warriors can't reach us in time to help!"
Talked? Talked how, Nelson wondered swiftly? Had mind somehow spoken to distant mind through the agency of the platinum crown? But how could a people who were desperate to obtain the ordinary weapons of the outer world possess such a super-scientific instrument as that implied?
Shan Kar was continuing urgently. "We must get up through the pass and into L'Lan before they block us! All depends on that!"
Nelson shared the bafflement of the others. In this outlandish situation, they couldn't estimate the true magnitude of perils.
"How many men have the Brotherhood, your enemies, sent out to cut us off?" he demanded.
"Perhaps not many men" answered Shan Kar. "But they have many who are not men. Too many for us."
"More superstition," spat Nick Sloan, disgustedly. "He's trying to tell us there are intelligent beasts coming against us."
Nelson hesitated. "This Brotherhood may use trained beasts as fighters at that. Such a fight would be plenty messy. Especially in a narrow pass."
Again, he was forced to make a quick decision based on information whose sources seemed too fantastic to be credited.
"Get the ponies moving!" he ordered. "Whatever danger may be ahead, we'd be better off to meet it inside the valley than up in that pass."
They started climbing out of the great gorge, Shan Kar leading them up a trail that twisted amid giant boulders and gaunt firs. Soon they glimpsed above them the crack of a pass that split the titanic moonlit wall of the range.
A pulse-quickening sense of expectation spurred Eric Nelson as he helped drag the ponies upward. What lay within that mighty wall of mountains, what guarded answer to the mysteries that seemed to deepen around them hour by hour?
They came up clear of the last trees onto naked rock and shingle with the last lofty rampart of the range looming before them. The pass was a mere narrow crack through that rampart.
It was a place of shadows and shivering cold. The ponies' hoofs clattered on the loose rock as they rode through.
They came out onto an open ledge of moonlight, and Shan Kar leaned in his saddle to gesture ahead.
"L'Lan!"
It looked like a valley of dreams to Eric Nelson. It looked like a place he had visited in some former life and had never quite forgotten.
It was a pear-shaped land fifty miles long, completely walled in by towering ranges that stepped up toward stupendous, snow-crowned peaks at the northern, narrow end of the pear.
The pass at whose outlet they sat their ponies was some twelve miles from the northern end of the valley and nearly a mile above its floor. They looked down into a land silvered by the rising moon.
"Where is the city of your own people?" Nick Sloan demanded brusquely of Shan Kar.
The other pointed southward. "That way — out of sight. But Vruun, the city of the Brotherhood, is there!"
He was pointing north of due west. Eric Nelson followed the direction of his finger.
Nelson had already noticed the big river that flowed down the valley, whose every sprawling loop caught the moon. Now he saw a little cluster of lights beside it near the north end of the valley.
Vruun, city of the mysterious Brotherhood? Nelson strained his eyes. He glimpsed around the lights a mass of vague, glimmering structures that were oddly enlaced by the surrounding forest.
Nelson caught his breath. Unless the light tricked him, Vruun could be like no Asiatic city he had ever seen.
"But what—" he began, turning to Shan Kar.
He didn't finish. The cry that came echoing faintly up out of the great moonlit valley struck him silent.
Hai - ooo!
No human cry was that but one he had heard before in the uplands. The hunting call of wolves, of many wolves.
Hai - ooo! Hai - ooo!
The ponies jumped nervously. Shan Kar's voice rang urgent above the clatter of their hoofs.
"Tark's clan race ahead to cut us off! We must ride fast for Anshan!"
"These pack-ponies can't go fast!" Nick Sloan started to object and was silenced by the grim reply.
"They will!"
They rode pellmell down slippery rock slopes, Shan Kar leading them southward. And forest came darkly up to meet them — black forest of fir and larch and cedar that seemed to clothe much of the great valley.
Each of them led one of the pack-ponies. Nelson noted that the heavily burdened, shaggy little horse he led was nervously running with all its strength.
"The Hairy Ones can go faster than we, but we have a start!" rang Shan Kar's voice from ahead. "All depends upon which of the Brotherhood are out!"
A few minutes later, as though to answer him, a squalling cat-scream drifted from far behind them — a screech of feline anger.
"Quorr and his clawed ones, too!" cried Shan Kar. "And Ei's scouts wing ahead!"
Nelson had already glimpsed the dark shapes of great winged things sliding fast above the forest, only momentarily visible through the tangle of black foliage against the silvered sky.
Ei's folks — eagles of the Brotherhood! Nelson saw three of them sweeping overhead, then circling back.
Abruptly they emerged from the forest onto rolling moonlit plain.
"Those are the lights of Anshan!" Shan Kar called back over the rush of wind. "See!"
Nelson glimpsed a few closely grouped lights far ahead in the moonlit vagueness of the valley. Then they were lost to view as the party galloped down into a declivity of the plain.
Hai - ooo!
Wolf-clan of the Brotherhood shouted to each other as they raced down the valley in pursuit!
Nelson thought, "I should be wondering if all this isn't a crazy dream. Only I know it isn't!"
No dream — no! The great peaks that walled L'Lan loomed lofty and clear in the moonlight. The wind smacked his face with irritating persistence, a twisted stirrup-leather was rubbing his leg raw.
Again the lights of Anshan came into view as they topped another rise in the plain. At the same moment, Lefty Wister uttered a strangled yell. "Blimy, they're—"
It was choked from his lips. Nelson, turning in the saddle, glimpsed the dark wolf-shape that was dragging the Cockney from his frantically bucking pony.
Black leaping forms were all about them, eyes and teeth gleaming in the moonlight. Eagle-wings threshed the night close overhead.
Nelson had his pistol out but his own pony was so frantic with fear that he could not fire. He heard a Dutch curse from Van Voss.
"Off saddle before they pull us down one by one!"
Nelson yelled, making a split-second decision. "Stick together— here!"
He was sliding from the saddle as he spoke, holding his scared pony's reins. A bkck bulk came at him in soundless rush and he triggered his automatic.
The staccato bark of the gun seemed momentarily to startle the dark beast-forms that were now all around them. As the creatures wavered, Van Voss shot the wolf that had dragged Lefty down.
The Cockney staggered up, a forearm slashed and bleeding, mouthing curses. Nick Sloan and Li Kin were already dismounted and Shan Kar was leaping catlike with a short sword from beneath his cloak.
"Help me get the tommy-guns out!" Nick Sloan shouted.
"Look out!" came Li Kin's scared cry. "There are men with them!"
* * *
Eric Nelson was later to remember this as the moment in which he first realized the fantastic otherworldliness of this valley.
For with the dark beasts charging them now came mounted men — men and horses who companioned wolf and tiger and eagle, men who wore queer metal skull-cap helmets and breastplates and wielded swords.
"There is Tark with Barin!" yelled Shan Kar.
Tark? Nelson's heart jumped. The great wolf who had been Nsharra's comrade, who had nearly had his throat out at Yen Shi?
Then he saw the wolf. He glimpsed that massive hairy head plunging forward beside an iron-gray horse on which sat a yelling, sword-wielding young man in helmet and breastplate.
Nelson and Li Kin and the Cockney had their rifles off their saddles and fired at the dark forms charging through the moonlight.
"Kill the men!" Nelson yelled. "The brutes will run off if we get their masters!"
He knew almost as he said it that it was not so, that his incredulity and accustomed habits of thinking were deceiving him.
For these beasts were intelligent. They showed it by the way in which wolf and tiger came on in irregular zigzag leaps to avoid the rifle-fire that was obviously new to them.
In one sense, it was like all the battles in which Eric Nelson had ever engaged. There was the same sense of crazy confusion, the lack of a clear pattern, the feeling of being caught in a random collision of forces in which personal effort counted for nothing.
Then, as always, the fight suddenly crystalized. The youth whom Shan Kar had called Barin was shouting in a high, ringing voice, the other horsemen and the great beasts gathering toward him. "Stand clear!" yelled Sloan, from behind. Nelson and the others jumped aside and Sloan and Van Voss let go with the submachine-guns they had hastily unpacked.
The chattering storm of lead broke full on the human and beast attackers massing for charge. Blood-chilling horse-screams and cat-squalls ripped the din as mounted men and beasts crashed.
"They are beaten — they cannot face your outland weapons!" cried Shan Kar. "See, they flee!"
The beasts and the few horsemen left were dropping back, retreating from that deadly fire. Tiger-squall and wolf-howl rose and fell swiftly. Hoofs drummed the plain. Then Nelson heard a long, clear eagle-scream from far up in the moonlit sky. There followed comparative silence. Shan Kar, sword in hand, was bounding out toward the dark bodies dotting the plain.
"Nelson, what kind of place is this valley?" came Sloan's shaken voice. "Wolves, tigers, eagles—"
"Kuei!" exclaimed Li Kin tremulously. "Shan Kar spoke truth! Brute and men are equal here — at least, in the Brotherhood!"
They heard Shan Kar yell something and plunged forward after him. They were in time to witness an astounding spectacle. Shan Kar, sword in hand, was tensely approaching a mighty, crouching wolf that had been attempting to drag away a man's limp form.
"It's Tark!" cried Shan Kar. "He was trying to drag Barin away!"
Eric Nelson glimpsed the flaring green eyes of the great wolf as it turned its face toward them. It did not snarl, as an ordinary beast would have done. It merely crouched for an instant, seeming to choose its victim swiftly before it sprang.
Nelson, startled, raised his rifle as the wolf launched itself for his throat. Shan Kar yelled at the same instant.
"Don't kill him if you can help it! He's valuable to us alive!"
The wolf would have died despite that cry had Nelson been able to shoot in time. But the spring was too swift for that. Nelson, involuntarily stepping back from the blazing-eyed charge as he raised his gun, tripped and stumbled.
He just glimpsed the terrific swing of Sloan's heavy gun as the other batted with it at the plunging wolf.
He heard the thud of the blow, felt Tark's massive, hairy weight hit him — but limply. Then he scrambled hastily from beneath the motionless body of the stunned wolf.
"We've got Tark alive and Barin, Kree's son, too!" Shan Kar exclaimed. "And we've given the Brotherhood its first taste of our new weapons!"
The man was ablaze with exultation and excitement. Nelson looked down at the two bodies. The wolf still lay senseless, and the youth Barin was bleeding from a crease-wound across the temple.
Nick Sloan looked more shaken than Nelson had ever seen him as he stared at the dead beasts that lay there on the moonlit plain.
"Nelson, these brutes are intelligent!" he panted. "Running with men, fighting as allies of men."
"Kuei!" repeated Li Kin, his saffron face pallid in the silver light. "A valley of witches and devils!"
Shan Kar interrupted. "More of the Brotherhood will be here swiftly. We must ride on fast for Anshan or die here on the plain!"
He was, as he spoke, kneeling to lash hide thongs securely about the feet of the stunned wolf.
Tark, the wolf, stirred as Shan Kar finished the task. The green eyes of the great beast flickered open. Then, seeing Shan Kar binding the youth, Barin, the wolfs lips writhed away back from great fangs in a soundless snarl
Shan Kar finished binding the youth, turned and laughed full in the face of the wolf.
"Tark the mighty, trapped like a tame outland dog!" He jeered at the great beast. "Did Kree send you to guard his stripling son? A potent guardian!"
The wolf made no sound, but his green eyes blazed an intelligent hatred of his mocker that made Eric Nelson's skin crawl.
"Riders are coming from the south!" Nick Sloan shouted suddenly. "Get ready!"